unethical blogger

It's that time again! FOSDEM 2015 is quickly approaching
and just like last year I'm
thrilled to be going again. This year I will be making a stop-over for a few
days in London (Jan 24-28th) to visit the Lookout London
office before heading towards Brussels. If you're interested in drinking a beer
in either location, ping me via twitter or
email.

For the past three years at Lookout we've hosted
an event called "Hacksgiving." Historically the event
has been focused on cool hacks typically oriented around projects or ideas that
are internal to Lookout. The first year, for example, a colleague and I
prototyped the messaging system that would power our business
product the following
year. Another group of hackers created the precursor to our signal
flare
feature that same year (hif I'm remembering correctly).

Earlier on this year I wrote this
post as a "mid-season"
report on how the little backyard farm (named Croy Family
Farms) of mine has been doing. Since that
time, in July, I've been eagerly waiting to write this post and somewhat
"conclude" the 2014 growing season.

This past October I was invited to represent JRuby in the
JavaOne 2014 "Script Bowl." A panel where community members from various
projects which implement scripting languages on top of the JVM pitch their
language to a live studio audience. This year's panel consisted of a members
from the Groovy, Clojure and Scala communities, and me representing JRuby of
course.

My first excursion into the internet or as it was then known by newscasters,
the information super highway, was courtesy of the University of Georgia. My
mom had gone back to school and as part of her program, there were a number of
new-fangled "online classes." We bought a 28.8 baud modem to go with our
Macintosh LC III, in this year it was already 3-4 years old, and used the
instructions distributed by the university to set up the Chooser to AppleTalk
or some bullshit like that. Mac OS System 7.6 was not very internet friendly.

Followers of mine on Twitter have no doubt
seen photos and periodic reports from "Croy Family Farms," the tongue-in-cheek
name of my backyard garden. I've not written or chronicled some of the
experiences in any amount of depth, despite this (2014) being the third growing
season I've been gardening. Unlike previous years, this year I'm keeping much
better track of what is growing well, what isn't, and what different plants are
yielding (with
photos).

The Bay Area transit system is what could be compassionately referred to as a
"clusterfuck." SFMTA, AC Transit, Samtrans, Caltrain, Golden Gate Transit,
BART, to name a few of the agencies that immediately come to mind. That's not
counting the agencies that run busses and light-rail further down towards Palot
Alto, etc.